[SGVLUG] article: best software ever written

[Emerson, Tom]

> -----Original Message----- Of Robert
> 
> There is a nice article about some of the best software ever written.
> 
> It's nice to see what was in the top three...
> 
> http://www.informationweek.com/ [...]

Odd that one of his criteria was how "groundbreaking" it was, yet he
still chose Excel over VisiCalc -- he even admits VisiCalc was "the
first of it's kind" and everything after that was a derivative, but
excel took the prize "because it had more features and is what everyone
uses today" -- sorry, no: before VisiCalc, NOBODY envisioned that sort
of use of the computer; after VisiCalc, every data processing problem
starts to look like a spreadsheet :(  [something about only having a
hammer comes to mind...]

THAT, more than anything else, tends to prove that VisiCalc, clunky or
buggy as it might have been, is the true honoree [after that, it's a
matter of maintenance -- had VisiCalc not been copycatted, it probably
WOULD have evolved to what Excel is today, bloat and all... ;) ]

-- 
"Knowledge is Power" -- Francis Bacon

Robert Leyva
mrflash818 at geophile.net